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It begins the way most rituals begin, with an offering.
Adam’s finger slips between her lips, cool as his kisses and bitter as the taste that always lingers on the roof of her mouth. Celine looks up at him through her lashes, and she sees him shake almost imperceptibly from the force of how deeply he wants her and how unwilling he is to let her have him. It’s his lashes, mostly, fluttering as she sucks at the ligaments, drawing her tongue along the bone leaving him wet with her wanting.
She should be more cautious. She is acutely aware of how obviously sensuous and deeply public the gesture is, if it can even be called a gesture, and not an act of sacrilege, but if Adam is going to look at her with such reverence, she would take far more in her mouth than just the long finger her lips are parted around.
The old gods did tend to require sacrifice.
His index finger, and the one next to it, are slick with her saliva when it falls back to his side, his hands stiff there, his posture rigid at the sight of her on her knees on the forest floor. A breeze makes the leaves sway in a slow dance, their leaves glittering green in her periphery as she rises again, and presses closer to him, closing the chasm that opened between them and threatens to swallow Adam alive.
That would be a fitting end for him. Done in by the weight and callousness of how much he wants her. But she won’t let go of him, especially if he’s dangling over an edge. She likes the taste of him too much. She wants to know what else he tastes like.
Celine looks up at him, gaze doe-eyed.
“You always taste so good.”
Her voice is hoarse, heady with salt and the roar of hunger.
He doesn’t speak, turning his shoulder in a gesture she recognizes as insolent, the struggle that she can feel beneath his skin when he flexes his hands after he touches her, as though he’s been burned by the heat of her. She can’t see his reaction to the depravity of her confession, and for a moment, her heart feels more like stone than organ, heavy in her chest at the sight of the back she’s raked her fingers down, left scratches that healed under her fingertips and she mourned on.
“Detective,” Adam says, the words thick with something she knows but doesn’t dare to name. She waits for the slip that is her name, the ‘Celine’ that became a moan, that became a thousand, became kisses like flower petals strewn over her naked limbs.
“Commanding Agent du Mortain.”
Her composure is teetering on the edge of collapse. He’s ruin and redemption, broad-shouldered and cruel as being born again for a god that does little more than make his people suffer and call it love.
She has never known anything but worship.
And he is something to worship.
Adam turns back, exhaling, and he’s so beautiful, so close to her that it makes her gasp, and he looks to her parted lips, a smile that disappears like a phantom, or a hallucination, on the corners of his mouth. He traces her lip with one of the fingers she wet, and it is still damp from her mouth, making her gasp again.
His mouth is insistent meeting hers, his weight an inexplicable rush all of its own.
How long as she dreamed of this, being kissed by him between the trees, being touched by him with the unit lingering nearby, with the desire that glistens in his green eyes and reminds her of spring snow melt, ice becoming water becoming his taste on her tongue?
“Celine,” he groans, to her lips, but the sound of it is foreign. His hand is on her waist, slipping beneath the band of her skirt, and she’s wearing something thin below that, so the heat of his touch seeps through. She’s panting against his neck as he traces shapes without names on the insides of her thighs, held up by him so she won’t collapse, her fingers clutching short strands of his hair as her chest presses into him, rising and falling in a quick rhythm that matches her pulse. “Tell me what you want.”
“God, Adam.” the moan stumbles from her throat, and she tips her head back, on the verge of begging. “Please. Touch me. There.” Another moan. Louder.
If he wants her quiet, he’ll have to cover her mouth, and she’ll have to taste him again.
Her sleeve slips down her shoulder, and his lips meet the exposed skin, murmuring something inaudible before he drags his teeth along it and she pulls on his hair and throws her head back, making him jolt against her. Her back is pressed to the broad side of a fir, the bark scraping insistently at her spine as Adam makes a mess of her, finger slipping beneath the fabric between her legs, pressing inside of her.
Nate.
He’s making a mark over the one Nate left on her a few nights ago.
+
They had been alone, the kitchen abandoned at that hour, and it was quiet, and she had watched the vampire from across the room before he beckoned her closer with a gentle smile that came over her like a revelation.
She had straddled Nate’s waist where he sat. The motion had made her skirt rise, and then he was touching the back of her legs, and she had found it, suddenly, much more difficult to breathe.
He was hot-blooded, the man under her, hot-blooded but cool-headed, but she was under his skin and riling him up, and she wanted to see what Nathaniel Sewell looked like when he was a mess, out of control because of her.
He moaned when she touched the hard outline of his cock through his neat, pressed trousers, and Celine had smiled into his neck, lips spreading slow across an artery that she found as enticing as he must have found hers, and she nipped at the skin there, taking it between her teeth and making him moan again, throwing his head back, meeting the edge of the chair and hissing.
“Celine,” he said, in a throaty tone that made her pulse pound cyclical and wave-like in her ears, “Don’t be a tease, darling. Ride me.” She melted when he called her names like that. He knew that. He held such an advantage over her. If Adam was worthy of worship, Nate required something stronger. The devotion that made true worship true worship. And both of them, together, would have consequences.
His fingers were in her hair, and she forgot that she was going to tell him that he was to do as she commands. The first tug had her chin pointing up, and the second made her eyes water, long, dark strands of her hair wrapped around his fists as she shitted in his lap, rutting against him still dressed, riding his thigh, her mouth opening and her eyes closing.
She had been so wet. When she looked down, through her lashes, she saw a bloom of dark fabric on his thigh, and when he touched the lacy edge of her underwear, beneath the bunched up tweed skirt that was drifting towards her waist, his finger slid easily between her folds, and then he was inside of her.
His smile was one of unadulterated pleasure: he knew exactly what he was doing to her. Celine rode him, just like he told her to, the sound of his name an echo that landed like falling rain, soaking both of them as she leaned back against the table he was sat at, still held by the hair and breathing hard, his hand back in his lap and his cock a rigid outline in his pants.
She wanted it in her mouth. She wanted him inside her again, filling her completely, bringing her to the edge of breaking and back again with little regard for Adam.
Adam.
She had glanced back, and like a premonition, he was there.
Such a strange position for him to find her in, her backside exposed and bearing the imprints of Nate’s fingers from where he held her in his lap, his hands tangled in her hair, his cock stiff for her, but the curve of Adam’s fleeting smile, recognition of their months old agreement, she could do as she pleased, stirred something in her that felt like electricity when she came beneath his steady gaze, still on Nate’s lap.
Adam could have been beneath her. She could take him apart, like Nate was taking her apart.
She wanted both of them.
The first clear thought she had had in months, unburdened by the expectations that would rot her from the outside in.
+
Adam’s head is between her legs.
Celine’s back arches, her neck exposed to the vampire, delicate in the low light of her bedroom, lit only by the light that manages to slip out from beneath her drawn curtains.
She presses his face to her core, fingers splayed at the back of his head, and he licks at her with an insatiability she hasn’t quite learned to fear, and instead likes far too much, his tongue tracing a garden of shapes, strange flowers, an alphabet in a language she’s only just learned existed, on the insides of her, drifting over her clit, accompanied by one of his long fingers sliding inside of her.
“Nate,” she gasps, shuddering, digging her fingers into Adam’s head, then his shoulders, collapsing around him, a supernova soaked in champagne (if that was how that went) and shaking as he slows down, reverting to gentle torment now that he has her on the verge of total implosion.
Adam looks up at her from under her sheets with his mouth wet from his saliva and her arousal, and there’s a sheen of obscenity on his cheeks as he draws the back of his hand across his mouth and then licks the remains from it.
“Is he the one you want, ma lune?” he asks, rising, cocking his head.
She breathes steadily, shallowly, reaching blindly for him. His fingers curl around hers, and he kisses the back of her hand gently, his eyes glowing a glittering shade of emerald that cuts through her like shining, silvery steel. Celine could say ‘yes’, in a low voice, and she knows he would adhere to her wishes, lavishing her with what she desires, even if that is his oldest friend and now bitterest rival.
She does not say yes.
“Stay with me,” she murmurs, tracing the length of one of his arms, fingers painting his broad shoulders with faint touches, knowing she’s captured his attention in its entirety. “Don’t be jealous. I want you here.”
Adam’s exhale is gentle, cool against her bare skin as he settles next to her. “You said his name.” There’s no greed in it. Something else lies under its surface. Affection. Reverence.
Mason always said she had them wrapped around her little finger.
Celine laughs softly, laying her head on his. “Have I ever told you,” she says, closing her eyes, as his hands resume their slow descent down her body, “Why I refused, for so long, to choose between you?”
Adam’s reply comes to her as if from across a dream. “No, you haven’t.”
“I was terrified. I didn’t want to make a mistake. I didn’t want to choose you and have known that I could have loved Nate just as much. I didn’t want to choose Nate and know that it was your arms I longed for. I didn’t want to choose the wrong one of you.”
He presses a kiss to her hipbone, and she feels the graze of his teeth, a sharp sting that fades to pleasure.
“Neither of you could ever be the wrong one.”
There’s a look of bliss on his face that rattles her when she opens her eyes again, if only because she’s never seen him look like that before.
Celine lowers her hands to cradle his face while he thrusts up into her, her chest moving as he does, one of her breasts slipping out from beneath the sheets. She is the picture of indignity and desperation, but she wants nothing less than to be left in ruins by him, torn apart by the teeth of his love, aching when she has to walk out of this place without him.
+
Both of them, inside her.
“Celine,” Nate breathes, “You feel so good.” He exhales to her shoulder, lips pressed to a love bite Adam made there earlier, still stinging red, but he doesn’t cover it with one of his own. “Come for us.”
She is unable to speak, looking up into his eyes instead, finding warmth and pleasure like dark wine in them.
And she is happy.